To the Devs: is Botting Funding you

[joojoo1975]

Been here for a bit, and though I Hope this is taken seriously and we actually have a descent discussion about this, I Fear the worst, but here goes.


Recently, I was talkin to some peeps in general about the aspect of the game. and one of them said to me that Botting in it's current form will never be eradicated because J&L get income from this(in the form of subscriptions and verified accounts) the botters use this for the extra inv and the convenience perks) now when this was said, I didn't want to believe it, but then again, it would kinda make sence.

So J&L:

A. do you get a lot of income from this

B. do you ever plan to eradicate botting for good?

[infectedking]

Botters aren't all funding Dev's income, if anything it's a the majority of the playerbase that is, botters do the same as everyone else when it comes to this. For bots people just set their areas to manage such spaces for inventory since easy to make chars. Botting infact has become less valued with things such as farming as Jorb/Loftars implementations that help out non-botting players with maintenance such as the Shift+Right click seed and plant area, also the Mining area things is really neat as well, infact I haven't used a mining bot since that even came out tbh.

[joojoo1975]

thank you for the Reply

It seems strange that the whole botting thing has become a by word and "joke" so to speak here are a few I googled just now:


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It was a nice day in the Akihabara realm, The bots were farming, all Russians were doing Russian things and even my best friend Davis had left me a nice message to wake up to!

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Google even kicked up a post from reddit, seems like they got themselves an H&H page over there:

[–]Vibed 1 point 1 month ago
It's VERY easily bottable. A huge part of the player count is in fact bots, has been like that ever since the old game in ~2011. I say that as someone who doesn't particularly dislike this game, I think it's one of the better "pure" sandbox MMOs out there. But then again, the internet Never lies!
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Bots can do anything you set them to from as small as:
-Run around shouting things at people

to

-Dis Mammoth bots that login every 15mins or so then scout the area and report their findings into their Discord chat



Bots also farm and craft and mine(mass mine) and do many other things, allows you to run a village with little effort, which makes it important to run such large scale operations such as factions.

So needless to say, I see it a lil differently. but once again. The Internet never lies!

[ChildhoodObesity]

i think the games easily botted but i think there are far less bots than people think, i dont even think bot accs make up for 1% of the income jorb/loftar make from this game xd bot accs just dont buy subscriptions as far as i know. NOT TO SAY EVEN THE SMALL AMOUNT OF BOTTERS ISNT A PROBLEM.

[spawningmink]

i think the games easily botted but i think there are far less bots than people think, i dont even think bot accs make up for 1% of the income jorb/loftar make from this game xd bot accs just dont buy subscriptions as far as i know. NOT TO SAY EVEN THE SMALL AMOUNT OF BOTTERS ISNT A PROBLEM.

I was in a town today that was entirely run by bots, dude had so many going that he said he forgets what some of them are doing at the time

[ChildhoodObesity]

i think the games easily botted but i think there are far less bots than people think, i dont even think bot accs make up for 1% of the income jorb/loftar make from this game xd bot accs just dont buy subscriptions as far as i know. NOT TO SAY EVEN THE SMALL AMOUNT OF BOTTERS ISNT A PROBLEM.

I was in a town today that was entirely run by bots, dude had so many going that he said he forgets what some of them are doing at the time

i know its scaramocuhe xd but thats 1 guy, there isnt that many ppl constantly botting that hard. id say hes the only one running bots like that

[jorb]

A) No clue. We don't know how many bots are run. I'm fairly sure we lose players who dislike botting as well, so it's a coinflip. Why pay if you're automating all tasks anyway?

B) No. We have answered this a million times, not least in our PAQ. You are asking us to design machine administered turing tests, and you have no idea how deep the philosophical question underlying that problem runs. We may target bots opportunistically if we feel like it and find a good angle of attack, but imagining that we can entirely remove automatization is naive, and for that matter not desirable. Not even the most draconian regime I can imagine -- biometric verification of player identity, say -- is any sort of meaningful gurantee against botting. Not even close. There is no obvious and simple heuristic which identifies an account as running a bot. Far more significant game developers than us have attempted and failed at this task.

Also, perhaps controversially, I do not believe that botting fundamentally and significantly -- at least not in the forms I have yet seen it -- threatens or undermines the normal and intended game experience. It's a far bigger issue as perceived than in reality.

[Myrgard]

Yes that is a very old discussion and of course you're right jorb. No one in their right mind is asking you to create something that would most likely take a functioning AI to achieve.

The long time sore spot isn't that there is no filter against boters. It's that there are no rules against it. I remember games where boting had been effectively eliminated by simply prohibiting bots and selectively (and draconialy) enforcing it. I do remember cases when people would be afraid to buy to cheap items from an auction house as everyone connected to boting got their accounts deleted every once in a while, even those that bought boted items.

So the basic argument here is that you're lazy. Just imagine how many boters there would be if an entire faction got destroyed and all their accounts erased because SOME of their members had been caught red handed using bots. Before long people would be reporting on their own village members. No you can't make a filter that will stop all bots from loging in, you can spent an hour a week policing the game actively looking for bots and dealing out punishment.

[Shadow7168]

If anything, bots get less of an advantage from verifying/subscribing than normal human players. I mean, is there that much of a difference in the time it takes for a bot - which can work 24 hours a day without getting distracted, tired, hungry or bored - to do a task with a few extra slots of inventory space than not?

As it stands I think botting should be allowed, if a part of the game is so tedious and boring that someone goes out of their way to write a bot to do it for them, then that part of the game is flawed. Farming in legacy is a prime example of that, but thanks to the new client in hafen, virtually no one bots farms anymore.

[Ozzy123]

Well most of fresh or not very experienced players don't care that much about botting, but if you're playing this game for 6 years and while playing 10h/day other people have 2 or 3 times higher stats than you becouse they are botting pumpkin pies 24/7 it really makes you quit and realize this game is pointless becouse you can't bot. I feel like the best solution to botting would be just banning a few of them, im sure that if someone got their miner or farmer banned then 90% of botters would stop botting or atleast they would have to make more alts for that which atleast would be more annoying for them.

At some point when you reach the endgame you will realize that all metals and the entire mining is botted. Bones used to increase trees ql are from botted hql hunting spots. Farming and pies are completly botted. All resources like salt/icicles are locked in palisades and bots gather them each time they respawn. I used to not care about that when combat system wasn't all about stats, but in its current state where stats are basically the only thing that matters even in group combat the realization that everyone around outstats you becouse they bot and you can't outskill them becouse combat is just 1 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 3 1 1 1 3 is pretty sad.